site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

We’re still waiting for one of your high-effort “Inferential Distance” posts to produce a single new insight or argument that hasn’t already been repeated by you in tons of smaller comments over the years. This was literally just a long-winded (and full of misspelled words and poor grammar) restatement of the exact same argument you’ve made 10,000 times.

You mock people who want to “consoom product” on the one hand, but on the other hand the only new content you produced in this post is extolling the supposedly profound insights of two massively-popular Hollywood films.

You brought up the Wittgenstein quote about how if a lion could speak, we would not understand him. Well, the lion also would not understand us! We could maybe glean an interesting window into the thought processes of an alien mind, if we really cared to listen and to parse things out over iterated conversations; meanwhile, there are entire constellations of subject matter which intelligent humans could try and make the lion comprehend - particle physics, the principles of compound interest, comparative linguistics - and he just wouldn’t have any hope of grasping any of it. Firstly because his brain simply does not have anywhere near the level of raw computing power that even a below-average human’s brain does, but also because he would find all of it utterly uninteresting and would not bother to try and grasp it.

I’m not saying you’re as dumb as a mere beast, Hlynka. But I am saying that your posts on this topic grow more and more tedious each time, because you continue to fail to demonstrate that you’re even making a cursory attempt to understand, or learn anything from, or synthesize, any of the counterarguments we offer. You can shout “identity politics is bullshit” three trillion times into the void, but if every time some smart person offers a sophisticated rebuttal and you don’t integrate that rebuttal into your worldview at all, people will justifiably begin to lose interest in you.